A Ghost

A ghost is made of gas, she said,
Not meat or milk or gasoline.
Your hand just passes through a ghost
Like nothing you have ever seen.

Departure

Emily is off to college tomorrow. As a parting gift, she gets from Dad a painting of the lake to remind her of our wonderful summers together, and a beat-up old book of mine that might help nip this tuition problem in the bud.

I’m very proud of daughter number one, who is already showing a little moxie by signing up to do some days with Habitat for Humanity in the hardscrabble inner city near her grassy campus before classes start.

Love,
Dad

Portrait of Sam W.

Sam and his family used to live across the street from us in Maplewood in the 1980s and 1990s. He and my oldest daughter were constant friends, and their mothers were a team. Sam’s stepmom asked me to paint him as a present to his dad. Sam is graduating high school this month. I first met him days after he was born.

We had a nice day together (first time we’ve spent together in about ten years). Emily, my daughter, took the photo of me painting him.

He Has Returned

Easterattitude Saturday

Egg says~ :.) Talk to the Egg

Paint it Green!

The Pogues With The Dubliners

Photo-Ops on Ice

Lydia photo by Daddy
Daddy photo by Lydia

The I Have A Dream Speech

Lydia’s friend Laura came for a play date this afternoon. The girls, seven-year-olds, asked to go on the computer, and, as usual, asked for help getting onto a website.

“Daddy, can you Google the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech for us?”

Uh…sure thing. They watched Martin Luther King, Jr. deliver his famous speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial. They watched the whole thing and asked me to print out a PDF. Then they got off the computer and went downstairs to play in the basement.

I like their teacher.

This evening I read the speech. It is one of the two most important in American history, according to Griel Marcus, the other being Lincoln’s second inaugural. I would agree. It manages to tell America’s history and lay out its destiny in the form of a great and unavoidable challenge. The goal, a dream. It decodes the genome of our experience, in a sense. And just as the Human Genome Project launched us on a long road to curing intractable disease with a new set of tools, King’s speech essentially showed us what we have to work with and pointed the direction to equality in America.

Lydia commented that King kept saying, “100 years later.” I explained he was referring to the time between the Emancipation Proclamation and King’s speech. I started thinking that an additional 43 years has passed. That enormous gains have been made, though much is essentially unchanged. That nearly 146 years after the Civil War, the struggle for racial equality is still our defining challenge.

And I thought about how Lydia and Laura couldn’t take their eyes off the I Have A Dream speech.

Trot, Trot to Boston…

…To see my nephew wed. My nephew Joshua, that is, not my nephew Billy, pictured above. I don’t have any pictures of Joshua, but I’ll take some tomorrow at his wedding. In Boston.

When I first met my wife Maureen—who is one of 11 children—I was swept into a maelstrom of future nieces and nephews, including Joshua and nine or ten others. All munchkins, and all delightful. I can still remember how much I looked forward to going big-time into the uncle business. I had no experience, but I felt I was immensely qualified. Maureen assured me it would be a snap. Just like skiing.

Soon, Maureen’s nephew Michael and his sister Jessica were ring bearer and flower girl at our wedding. That was 23 years ago. They were flower children—their father, an ex-cop, drove a Volkswagen. Then we all grew up. Mike is now an ex-Marine. Jessica is still a federal marshal in Florida. Billy, above, recently joined the Air Force. He’s training to operate the fuel nozzle for mid-air fueling, and is in his Uncle Joe’s (Maureen’s brother’s) crew on a flying DC10 gas station. Joe, a pilot in the reserves, told me at Christmas that he thinks there is near zero chance that Billy will be deployed to Iraq.

Joshua. The man of the weekend is a computer man. He works for IBM. His sister Katrina, studying pharmacy in San Diego, married two years ago. Very sadly, their sister Andrea died in October, 2001, of cancer. She was a senior in high school. I learned of her diagnosis on the morning after the 2000 election. That was a bad day. She lived into the saddest month of all our lives. I’m out of touch with Josh, but I have seen him from time to time. While most of my nieces and nephews are taller than me, Joshua towers over me. He has a goatee that encircles an enormous toothy grin. I remember him as a spry little monkey-boy in Terre Haute in the early 1980s. I have yet to meet his future (near-term future) wife, Christina. But I sent spygirls to her wedding shower a month ago, and they really like her.

Well, I now have 26 nieces and nephews on Maureen’s side of the family, including Joe’s two little girls, both adopted in China. The youngest of all, Dominic, was born to sister-in-law Katie more than two months prematurely. He needed heart surgery almost immediately. He’s a vivacious three year old now, and he’ll be Big Chief at the wedding, as he is at all family affairs.

Hope to have some good photos of the “munchkins” and others next week. And I hope to get a little time, camera in hand, in and around Boston, one of my favorite cities.

Stone Sole Christmas

Twenty years ago, a man traced my bare foot on a yellow legal pad in the plaza at Lincoln Center in New York City. He took the tracing home to Spring Lake, Minnesota, and two months later I got my moccasins in the mail. Leather-soled moccasins made by Lyle and Elaine MacRostie, true ‘60s-style craftspeople who came each summer to the fair at Lincoln Center with their fantastic handcrafted footwear. Lyle, tall and thin with a long salt-and-pepper beard, wore a thrift shop fedora and smoked a curved pipe. Elaine, more plainspoken then anyone you’re likely to meet in or around Lake Wobegon, did all the talking. They claimed to have no phone, electricity, or running water. I didn’t doubt it—they had an aura of unpretentious self-sufficiency.

And those moccasins! They are the only articles of clothing or footwear I’ve ever known to feel like an actual extension of my body. Leather against skin, the perfect fit, my tendency to wear them all summer without socks, all contributed to the natrual effect. In the winter, I wore them every moment of my ambulatory life indoors…with woolen socks, or I’d catch cold. I made the mistake of treating the soft leather soles gingerly for maybe a year when I first got them. Then I took them right out on the nature trail.

I expected expert handmade leather moccasins to hold up, but these things were astonishing. They tended to heal like living animals. At any spot where I’d worn through a layer of leather on the bottom, a kind of callus would form. These patches became rock-hard on the outside, detracting not a bit from the buckskin foot massage on the inside. Not that they didn’t look a little roughed up. Some of the lacing sproinged on the tops and the right one favored an open-toe style. The bottoms dried out and calcified. There may even have been moss growing on the bark-like undersoles. Sometimes I wondered if I should really wear them in ShopRite.

I lost one of them at Keuka Lake last summer, and I thought it meant the end of the run. It went missing halfway through our week at the house, and serial search parties came back empty-handed. I sadly put the last duffle bag in the car on the last day, certain I’d never see that beloved hunk of leather again. Then, two months later, a box came in the mail. My moccasin was found behind the refrigerator (where I thought I’d looked!). The owner of the house sent it with a note saying that the Oswego Indians associated Keuka Lake, one of New York’s Finger Lakes, with good luck. Nothing remains lost there forever, he wrote.

About two months ago, both moccasins disappeared at home. They were under neither bed nor couch. I looked. They were under nothing. Only a mysterious digital trace remained: On my daughter’s camera, which she’d leant me, I noticed amid several photos of 14-year-old girls voguing, or whatever it is they do, a photo of my moccasins looking like exhibit A. The shoes that began as a simple line on yellow paper looked in the photo like they were about to have a chalk line drawn around them. Daughter pleaded dumb. I went into despair.

All through November and December, I wore cheesy Sears moccasins with phony wool linings. None of my many transgressions, sartorial or otherwise, ever felt so creepy and wrong. I began losing interest in the things I love.

Last week, when the post office left a note about a package waiting to be picked up at the depot, I assumed it was a present I’d ordered for a friend. Maureen picked it up while I was at work. She told me it wasn’t the package I thought it was, but that I’d like it even better. She and the girls giggled.

By now, dear reader, you may have guessed what was in the box. That’s because you’ve read this far and you probably looked at the photo up top. Please bear with my cluelessness on Christmas morning, however, as I am handed the box all wrapped up.

Yes, Maureen and the girls had hijacked my leather moccasins and returned them to the masters (who still have no phone, but do have a website) for new soles—and remedial stitching that amounts to something just short of a new-build. Lyle and Elaine dyed them dark brown to make new leather match old. In the box, on a yellow sheet of legal paper, was a note saying how glad they were to hear from Maureen, who used to work for the Lincoln Center craft fair organizers in the ’80s. “Those moccasins are 20 years old,” Elaine wrote. “Wow!” Via e-mail, Elaine told Maureen that my rough-worn babies set a MacRostie durability record (though they did have a tougher repair job once on a pair chewed to pieces by a dog). The note said that the original leather won’t last for ever, and that I might want to think about a new pair.

Maybe. But, I’m thinking we can probably just get new tops put on the old pair when I retire!

Thanks girls!
XOXOX
Dad
______________________
EPILOGUE:
[I am tucking Lydia in on Christmas night.]

Me: And, Lyddie! Thank you so much for sending my moccasins to get fixed. [I pull off my left moccasin and dangle it from my finger over Lydia as she lays snuggled up in her blanket] These are very special to me, and now I can wear them for many more years!

Lydia:… Don’t put that on my bed.